Thursday, March 23, 2006

It's Official: China Has 400 Million Mobile Subscribers

"The number of Chinese mobile subscriptions reached 404 million at the end of February, according to statistics released Wednesday by China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII)."

"However, the figures released by MII do not mean that 400 million people in China have mobile phones, said Ted Dean, managing director of telecommunications consultancy BDA China Ltd. "This basically counts the number of SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) cards out there," he said. Many Chinese mobile subscribers have more than one SIM card, Dean said. Even so, China is the largest mobile market in the world and the latest figures extend its lead over other countries, such as the U.S. and Japan, he said."